Books – Page 13

Steve Martin describes a breakthrough in his comedy routine

At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, I played for approximately a hundred students in a classroom with a stage at one end. I did the show, and it went fine. However, when it was over, something odd happened. The audience didn’t leave. The stage had no wings, no place for me to go, but I still had to pack up my props. I indicated that the show had ended, but they just sat there, even after I said flatly, “It’s over.” They thought this was all part of the act, and I couldn’t convince them otherwise. Then I realized there were no exits from the stage and that the only way out was to go through the audience. So I kept talking. I passed among them, ad-libbing comments along the way. I walked out into the hallway, trying to finish the show, but they followed me there, too. A reluctant pied piper, I went outside onto the campus, and they stayed right behind me. I came across a drained swimming pool. I asked the audience to get into it—“Everybody into the pool!”—and they did. Then I said I was going to swim across the top of them, and the crowd knew exactly what to do: I was passed hand over hand as I did the crawl. That night I went to bed feeling I had entered new comic territory. My show was becoming something else, something free and unpredictable, and the doing of it thrilled me, because each new performance brought my view of comedy into sharper focus.

His memoir is a great read: well written, not long, full of memorable stories and recognizable people (like Elvis).

Life = a Garden

The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things. The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe. It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food. It’s a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses; it’s about winning, about providing society with superior things, and about proving that you have taste and good values and you work hard. And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it. What a great metaphor!

A friend recommended Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird [Kindle]. It had a cute title and seemed a quick read and was about the life and advice of a successful writer, so I read it. I confess, I had to grind to finish the book. I just wanted her to tell me how to be a better writer. Semicolons or no. When to use adverbs if at all. How to start and finish a short story.

Instead, she wanted to use writing as a metaphor and a gateway to explore the more important issues, of family and loss and struggle. I was too impatient. Maybe that’s her point. Just take it bird by bird, right.

Apparently the book has quite a cult following. I found the above passage glowingly quoted in another book (I forget which one, sorry). And then the flashbacks came, of Anne’s wonderful writing, of the neat little images she painted into my mind’s eye. Her voice really is unique. Part of me suspects that when I reread the book in a few years, maybe sooner, it will be like seeing a casual friend after many years. And who knows, times have changed. Maybe we can become great friends now.

9 beautiful sentences from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It

You know a story is a good one when it makes you care, deeply, about worlds you never bothered before. In this case, fish and rivers and fly fishing in rivers and the love of brothers. In A River Runs Through It [Kindle], Norman Maclean’s writing feels like that of Steinbeck: folksy, grounded in a place and tradition, and always seeking to discover more, to shed more light, on why human relationships are the fragile and miraculous things they are.

“You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.” Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

To him, all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

I could feel all the excitement of losing the big fish going through the transformer and coming out as anger at my brother-in-law.

Poets talk about “spots of time,” but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.

My mother had to go from basement to attic and to most closets in between looking for a fishing basket while she made lunches for three men, each of whom wanted a different kind of sandwich.

Clearly by now it was one of those days when the world outside wasn’t going to let me do what I really wanted to do—catch a big Brown Trout and talk to my brother in some helpful way. Instead there was an empty bush and it was about to rain.

That’s how you know when you have thought too much—when you become a dialogue between You’ll probably lose and You’re sure to lose.

We had to be very careful in dealing with each other. I often thought of him as a boy, but I never could treat him that way. He was never “my kid brother.” He was a master of an art. He did not want any big brother advice or money or help, and, in the end, I could not help him.

The most beautiful five sentences

From John Steinbeck’s East of Eden [Kindle].

On the edge of the field stood a little pump house, and a willow tree flourished beside it, fed by the overspill of water. The long skirts of the willow hung down nearly to the ground. Abra parted the switches like a curtain and went into the house of leaves made against the willow trunk by the sweeping branches. You could see out through the leaves, but inside it was sweetly protected and warm and safe. The afternoon sunlight came yellow through the aging leaves.

Karl Knausgard on memoir and memory

Finally started book 2 of his memoir series, My Struggle [Kindle].

Seeing her grow up also changes my view of my own upbringing, not so much because of the quality but the quantity, the sheer amount of time you spend with your children, which is immense. So many hours, so many days, such an infinite number of situations that crop up and are lived through. From my own childhood I remember only a handful of incidents, all of which I regarded as momentous, but which I now understand were a few events among many, which completely expunges their meaning, for how can I know that those particular episodes that lodged themselves in my mind were decisive, and not all the others of which I remember nothing?

Reminds me of another quote:

Memory is not the opposite of forgetting, it is a form of forgetting – Milan Kundera